A little while back, Sayed Hashimi and I built the Web Developer Checklist Chrome extension as a companion for the website webdevchecklist.com. We built the extension in Visual Studio and quickly realized that we could optimize the development experience substantially by tweaking the build process along with other details.

From that experience, we now have a project template that contains all you need for writing a Chrome extension and it is available for download.

The project template gives you the following features:

JavaScript Intellisense for the Google Chrome object model

Folder structure suited for production ready Google Chrome extensions

MSBuild integration to produce .zip files to upload to the Google Web Store